Live data from Hacker News

100 time cheaper dropbox like service

hubic.com

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#81

Those prices are crazy and are not sustainable. I don't think they're going to disappear, but customers should expect prices to rise in the future ...

actually according to dewey:

From their forum: "As nearly 270,000 of you now use hubiC, we have been able to confirm our technical decisions and this volume has enabled us to further optimise our infrastructure and its performances. Result: we're now able to lower our prices again, and this time we're aiming for nothing less than a million users!"

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#82
I dont know why everything about OVH 's graphics and design all seems to have a distinct lack of taste. In other words they are ugly.

Now back to topic. How much is it in USD then? Since it paid in Euro and includes VAT by default. What if i dont need to pay VAT?

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#83
post #81

Those prices are crazy and are not sustainable. I don't think they're going to disappear, but customers should expect prices to rise in the future ...

actually according to dewey: From their forum: "As nearly 270,000 of you now use hubiC, we have been able to confirm our technical decisions and this volume has enabled us to further optimise our infrastructure and its performances. Result: we're now able to lower our prices again, and this time we're aiming for nothing less than a million users!"

I don't see in any part of his statement that they're profitable and that they won't rise the prices once they have established dominance in the storage market.

It's only by being so cheap that they can carve themselves a place in this saturated market.

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#84
post #73
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every personal user I know doesn't upgrade to the next tier because of the price.

I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. They need a $5/month bucket, DigitalOcean style. IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition and would take in tonnes of cash. Making it the Spotify of storage.

Would that cover their S3 costs to store the data?

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#85
post #34

Seems to be based on OpenStack [1] Storage [2]. That means any client that supports OpenStack (and Rackspace Cloud Files [3], for that matter) like Cyberduck [4] and a lot more should already be compatible with hubiC. [1] http://www.openstack.org/ [2] https://api.hubic.com/ [3] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack [4] http://cyberduck.ch

Do you know a good client for Linux? Their official client [1] requires mono and I don't want to install that on my server (or even my desktop, for that matter). [1] http://mir7.ovh.net/ovh-applications/hubic/hubiC-Linux/1.1.1...

They seem to use custom OAuth-based facade, so bare OpenStack clients won't work out of the box (or I'm missing something, I'm just starting to read about what Swift is).

First I tried to use API console to get storage API URI and auth token, but I misunderstood something and it didn't work for me.

This, on the other hand, helped, although it uses some other API endpoints (still, those are OVH APIs): https://github.com/gierschv/node-hubic-swiftauth

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#86

It seems that their links are already running at half capacity. http://weathermap.ovh.net/ OVH is a big company though, so I'm more or less confident that they can handle this smoothly.

OT: Anyone know of a "weathermap" like this that can be overlaid w/ Google Earth or similar?

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#87
post #73
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every personal user I know doesn't upgrade to the next tier because of the price.

I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. They need a $5/month bucket, DigitalOcean style. IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition and would take in tonnes of cash. Making it the Spotify of storage.

> I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure.

I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts.

On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use.

> IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ...

I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB.

It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for.

That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level).

Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous.

At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month.

In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option.

As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#88
post #67

Are there really people who are turned off by dropbox prices? I would take notice if someone made a dropbox with a valuable additional feature, or a dropbox that worked better (recognizing that already dropbox works very smoothly). But price seems like a nonstarter.

I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage, but they don't offer anything in that area. This service does, and for an astonishingly great price. 10TiB for 10€, and they even promised something about internal 3x storage redundancy. I'm unzipping my wallet right after I run basic checks with free account.

> I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage ...

That's what I'm using Amazon Glacier for. I have tons of old files that I'll likely never need/want again and that I would normally just blow away in order to regain the disk space. It's so damn cheap, though, that I've started archiving them all to Glacier and then blowing them away.

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide a link for this statement? I found only statements about transport layer security, not about storage. Maybe it meant not "encrypted" but "protected"?

https://hubic.com/en/discover-hubic “Only you will have access to your data, using your login and password.” I admit that the statement above is ambiguous, which is why I think the answer isn't obvious, and which again is why I asked the question in the first place.

> “Only you will have access to your data, using your login and password.”

I don't remember their exact wording, but that sounds very similar to what Dropbox originally claimed (before it was determined that their employees absolutely did have access to your data).

Re: 100 time cheaper dropbox like service

#90
post #64
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH is the largest not the best French host. They're a budget host that vastly oversells. OVH has no such reputation for responsiveness, their "fair" prices are based on many fold overselling their network and holding onto and charging the same for hardware that's ten years old. They recycle disks even when they're about to die. They overload racks and cause power issues (Your whole rack rebooted? Sorry, one of the s…

You are a customer or where is that info coming from ?

I've had some SLA annoyances from them and setup fees have been expensive, but overall their dedicated servers have provided me with pretty fantastic value when I was running them.

I'm a Canadian and I've been considering grabbing a box here from them, www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml the pricing is ridiculously low.

You wouldn't get 10TB, but if you mirror the disks for 50$ a month you have a reliable 2TB of disk space in a datacenter much closer (for most) and 4 cores on 32GB of ram would give you a nice gaming server or a pretty powerful database.

Their VPS product (if they still do that anymore) would most likely be oversold. They are a massive operation that competes aggressively on price.

Post reply on HN